Volume 2. No 3 Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis Spring 1994

Teaching with the Internet:
What There Is and What There Might Be

by Kevin Roddy, Medieval Studies

There are three categories of information on the
Internet that are useful in teaching:

source materials (texts, images, and sounds) that
are actually studied in the class (Moby Dick, for
example, or the Vatican manuscript collection, or
Vivaldi concerti);

scholarly articles about these sources, either as
archived by libraries or, increasingly, through
electronic journals; and

the wide-ranging informal discussion among
interested parties about the subject, whether it
is music or politics or ecology.

I have explored all three categories in my
Humanities 40 course, recognizing that each offers
its own advantage and complementary disadvantage.

Regarding the first category, directly accessing
a source can permit infinite treatment and
manipulation, as, for example, discovering all the
uses of "white" in Moby Dick. However, this
capability cannot substitute for reading a book,
listening to a symphony, or attending an art show.

Similarly, though the network has made
scholarship on a subject more immediate and more
widely available, the computer-screen is ill-suited
to conveying broadly structured, tightly logical
argumentation. The common practice of downloading
and printing these articles simply means that the
cost of publication has been shifted from the
publisher to the university.

And finally, the Internet conveys, on a large
scale, the interactive and fluid nature of all
academic work, but it also produces chaos that is
often at best only a waste of time.

On the basis of this experience, I feel I can
make a few predictions about the future of the
Internet in instruction. I believe that we will be
able to enhance the Internet's advantages and
(maybe less so) avoid its dangers. I also believe
that the revolution will be slower and less
traumatic than many fear.

Even so, the Internet will continue to change the
way we receive and convey information. Faculty will
rightly continue to insist that there is no
substitute for experiencing a work as it was meant
to be experienced, but in general we will benefit
from a more convenient access to data bases,
especially those in the fields where information
quickly becomes obsolete.

For reasons having more to do with the cost of
postage than with speed, more and more full-text
scholarship will appear online. With the explosion
of this sort of information, we can hope for
finding and using filtering tools such as are
becoming common in medicine to help us sort the
relevant from the irrelevant.

And last, regarding the vulnerability of the
network to unconscious or conscious abuse, this
condition will unfortunately remain. However, it
can be lessened by simple precautions made
available to the user and largely the user's
responsibility.

On this last point, the notion of some Internet
police officer protecting us from potential harm is
not in the best interest of higher education. It is
a principle of great tradition at the university
that the weaknesses as well as the strengths of
intellectual discourse constitute educational
experiences in themselves.